Libraries of the future are going to change in some unexpected ways

Your idea of a library might be a musty, carpeted room with
outdated technology, but don't ditch your library card just yet.

According to David Pescovitz, co-editor at Boing Boing and
research director at the Institute for the Future, a Palo
Alto-based collective that makes forecasts about our world, it's
likely in the coming decades that society's traditional
understanding of a library will get completely upended.

In 50 years' time, Pescovitz tells Business Insider, libraries
are poised to become all-in-one spaces for learning, consuming,
sharing, creating, and experiencing — to the extent that enormous
banks of data will allow people to "check out" brand-new
realities, whether that's scaling Mt. Everest or living out an
afternoon as a dog.

To understand how libraries will change by the mid-21st century,
Pescovitz says people need to understand what function they
currently serve. At their core, libraries in the information age
provide a public means of accessing knowledge, he says. That's
what people crave.

The hallmark of future libraries, meanwhile, will be
hyper-connectivity. They'll reflect our increasing reliance on
social media, streaming content, and open-source
data.

AP/Christof Stache

The definition of a library is already changing.

Some libraries have 3D
printers and other
cutting-edge tools that makes them not just places of
learning, but creation. "I think the library as a place of access
to materials, physical and virtual, becomes increasingly
important," Pescovitz says. People will come to see libraries as
places to create the future, not just learn about the
present.

Pescovitz offers the example of genetic engineering, carried out
through "an open-source library of genetic parts that can be
recombined in various way to make new organisms that don't exist
in nature."

For instance, people could create their own microbes that are
engineered to detect toxins in the water, he says, similar to how
people are already meeting up in
biology-centered hacker spaces.

Ho
New/Reuters

Several decades from now, libraries will morph even further.

Pescovitz speculates that
humans will have collected so much data that society will
move into the realm of downloading sensory data. What we
experience could be made available for sharing.

"Right now the world is
becoming instrumented with sensors everywhere — sensors in our
bodies, sensors in our roads, sensors in our mobile phones,
sensors in our buildings — all of which all collecting
high-resolution data about the physical world," he says.
"Meanwhile, we're making leaps in understanding how the brain
processes experiences and translates that into what we call
reality."

That could lead to a "library of experiences."

In such a library, Pescovitz imagines that you could "check out"
the experience of going to another planet or inhabiting the mind
of the family dog.

What probably won't change that much are librarians and the
physical spaces they watch over. Pescovitz suspects that humans
will always need some sort of guide to make a foreign landscape
more familiar. Whether humanity turns that job into one for
artificial intelligence is another matter, he says.

"We talk a lot about information and the information age,
but really what I think people are looking for is wisdom and
knowledge," Pescovitz says.

That has been true for thousands of years and will continue to be
true for thousands more, no matter how weird the future might
get.